Russian forces on Monday hit multiple train stations and railway infrastructure at five points in central and western Ukraine in what appears to be a coordinated attack designed to cripple the country’s logistics and cripple vital infrastructure. The bombings, which took place within an hour, killed at least five people and injured more than 40. These attacks come hours after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. American politicians came and went by train via Poland in a visit the White House had tried to keep secret.
The Ukrainian military command, in a note published on social networks, has assured that the attack on the railway infrastructure was aimed at “interrupting arms supplies” that its Western allies are sending to Ukraine. Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov has claimed that Moscow used “precision weapons” to destroy substations that have deadened some of the railway lines Kyiv uses to transport foreign arms and military equipment.
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President Zelenskyy has been insisting for weeks on his demand for arms from his allies in order to face the second phase of the Russian invasion, now 61 days old and now centered on the Donbass region in the east and southern flank of the country. The United Kingdom announced on Monday that it would send Stormer armored vehicles to Ukraine. The US also plans to send a new shipment of artillery pieces, rockets and grenades to the eastern country.
Days after a Russian military command announced a second phase of the invasion of Ukraine, focusing on the Donbass region and the south of the country after its offensive against Kyiv failed, the self-proclaimed rulers of the separatist region of Transnistria in Moldova announced this Monday assures that a government building in the capital of this region, Tiraspol, which has not been recognized by the international community, was bombed with a hand grenade launcher. Moscow pointed out that the new objective of this offensive is also to gain access to Transnistria (border region with southern Ukraine), an area that has been trapped in the Cold War for years and in which Russia (which does not recognize this area as independent) has a military group of about 1,000 soldiers in charge of old ammunition depots of the ussr.
In recent weeks, Ukraine’s government has warned that Russia could also launch attacks from this territory, which declared independence in 1990 and voted to join Russia after several unrecognized referendums, with which it shares no border. However, Moldovan President Maia Sandu said she had no information that Transnistria was preparing an offensive against Ukraine. The governor of Ukraine’s Vinnitsia region in the south-west of the country accused Russia of the attack in Transnistria on his Telegram channel, which he described as a “planned provocation”.
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Meanwhile, in the Russian city of Bryansk, 160 kilometers from the border with Ukraine and a key center of the offensive in the neighboring country, large fires ravaged oil wells on Monday. Images posted to social media showed plumes of smoke billowing from the facility.
Plumes of smoke over an oil well, this Monday in Briansk, Russia NATALYA KRUTOVA (NATALYA KRUTOVA VIA REUTERS)
Russian authorities have not clarified the cause of the fires and said they are investigating the causes. Russian state television reported two separate explosions, one at a civilian oil storage facility, part of a pipeline, and one at a military oil depot, in what some analysts say could be an act of Ukrainian sabotage. On other occasions, Moscow has accused Kyiv of carrying out multiple attacks on border crossings and other facilities in the country, and on Monday it assured that Ukraine had attacked Neyoteevka, the border crossing on the Belgorod-Kharkov highway.
The UK this Monday estimated that around 15,000 Russian soldiers died in the offensive launched by President Vladimir Putin on February 24 against Ukraine. The Russian Defense Ministry has acknowledged just over 1,300 deaths. In Russia, it is punishable by up to 15 years in prison to disseminate unofficial information (i.e. any data or denunciations not derived from government sources, including death tolls) or to call what the Kremlin calls a “military operation in Donbass” “a war . “. This offensive, according to Putin, aims to “denazify” Ukraine, a country ruled by a Jewish president, and to “liberate and protect” the Russian-speaking population, although residents of cities like Kharkov, the second-largest in the Ukrainian country and majority Russian speakers, they are under constant fire. This Monday, the umpteenth attack that left this city in ruins killed three people.
New evacuation bug in Azovstal Steelworks
Some children with some Ukrainian soldiers, on Saturday at the Azovstal steel mill.
The attempt to evacuate civilians trapped in the siege of the Mariupol steelworks failed again this Monday. Around a thousand civilians are taking refuge in the underground facilities of the Azovstal Steelworks, where strong Ukrainian soldiers and members of the Azov Battalion have become, a brigade formed in 2014 with ties to organizations and members of the extreme right that has become rampant over the course of the Years ago it lost most of its founding members and turned into a special forces group integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard.
Azovstal has become the last bastion of the Ukrainian resistance in the nearly razed city on the Sea of Azov, where satellite images have revealed huge mass graves in recent days. Mariupol has become one of the symbols of the horrors of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia announced plans for a ceasefire on Monday, but the Ukrainian government warned that Moscow had again broken its promises and could not guarantee the security of humanitarian corridors.
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